Like all corruption in the USA the fraud is just baked into the system.
The problem humanity has long had is that war is profitable for the parasites in society.
We should simply make all costs of war, including compensatory damages for innocent victims payable by the richest ~5% through taxation of their income and seizure of their wealth. They want war… make them at least pay for what they ordered.
Needing to use a draft is a bad sign - the more of your soldiers are volunteers the better quality you'll get out of that.
That's a luxury position, which unfortunately not every country is in.
There would be no war pretty soon.
Something similar has been suggested for starting nuclear war: if things are bad enough that you are willing to doom whole populations of mostly-innocents to their death, you shouldn't have any trouble directly killing one more.
You could make it even more symbolic by doing it as seppuku instead: if you have failed badly enough as a politician that politics isn't even an option anymore and many soldiers have to pay the ultimate price to make up for your failure, then you should be the first one to do so.
Sadly, they care less about their own children usually than if you made it far simpler, simply make the full cost of any war totally and solely payable by the ruling/upper classes through both immense taxation on their income, i.e., 90% and a wealth tax of 10%, total forfeiture of all assets if they is any attempt to hidden them and are not reported, and a bounty of 50% for discovery of any unreported assets.
Now THAT would end all wars everywhere, except it would likely also cause the money to try to escape to a place that does not have such policies and use that as a base of operations to build/raise a force of subversion, infiltration, corruption, etc.
Frankly, people really have very little understanding of the "shape" of what they are up against. It's often dismissed and I don't even think the people who call it "spiritual warfare" really understand it either, but it is essentially a power, a force that has been often described, but never defined or identified properly that is essentially an abstraction, a graph, more an amorphous fluid dynamic than a material thing. If you know anyone that is an extremely manipulative narcissist and pathological and deliberate, psychopathic liar, you have come face to face with the constantly shifting, ducking, weaving, and orchestrating nature of the system that so many are hard pressed to understand because it is not a line of men on a battlefield, it is not a missile, it is not even "money" it is data, digital transactions of "currency", information as currency... the life blood of manipulation, abuse, and evil.
The trouble usually is, that the 95% has a huge portion willing to sacrifice anyone else in the same society they live on for peanuts dropped to them by the 5%! : / (see the Trump effect as a light example) Parasites are everywhere, being rich or poor, they suck out the blood of fellow people.
The share of ignorants (does not move a muscle in any direction) are even bigger than the peanut lovers so a healthy society is a fairytale. The economically stronger eat up the weak still.
You are wrong to assume that everyone in that 5% want war.
And what about the soldiers or operations folks that actually carry out the war?
We could do a better job punishing soldiers for war crimes. But responsibility for the war itself rests with the President, congress, and the ones with power over them (which is supposed to be the entire population, but the top 1% do have an incredibly outsized influence in US politics. Not that I think it's healthy to codify that)
I am pretty sure you can quit if you think your employer is doing bad stuff.
You cannot "just quit" the military as an employer.
Ignoring those orders means jail.
What you appear not to realize is the real fraud of this whole fake system; where the top defraud everyone else with "money printing", which they then use to bail out themselves and spend through government spending, which goes to themselves also through several channels like giving it to the bottom, which spends it on products/service that percolate up, on nepotistic corrupt government contracts to themselves, etc.
That's why the amount of government spending and debt is in direct lockstep with the accumulation of wealth of the top whatever percentage you want to use as a cutoff.
It's more complex than that, but that's the simplest form and most people don't even have a clue that even that is how the system actually works. They just see the inflation that causes products to get more expensive as their money is being defrauded away through essentially counterfeiting.
It seems to blow people's minds to accept things like "how can there be $100B in medicare fraud alone every single year", but that's really just what the government even roughly admits to or can easily identify because it is so blatant that they can't ignore it, not even some of the other obvious stuff that Coffeezilla talks about that should be blatantly obvious to the point that SWAT teams are sent in immediately (like the two top billing companies for certain medicare treatments being based in the same strip-mall, right next to each other and both being empty/vacant).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eWJISlh0fw [2] https://www.effort.news
It's funny that the joke is "we can't have healthcare because we spend on wars".
I wish I were such a useful idiot that I could just imagine-away incentives in a system so I could more easily create imaginary solutions :(
And on the other end of the spectrum you've got "my company makes .001% of widgets that do X but we make 50% of widgets that do X at -200deg F so we'll have our lobbyists wine and dine the brass until that number starts showing up in the technical standards forcing anyone who's submitting an RFP to use our product".
And of course the latter always tries to pretend like it's the former. It's not an easy problem. Sometimes concerns are valid. Sometimes they're bullshit. Usually the peddlers of bullshit believe their own bullshit.
The famous $600 hammer was a special non-sparking metal for use in an explosive environment. The famous expensive toilet seat was for use on the space shuttle (space station?). Both of these examples got a lot of press 30+ years ago, and it was years before the rest of the story got out.
I've read that the hammer was an accounting artifact (#1-3 below). In other words, someone decided not to piece out what each bit of a contract cost, they simply took the whole contract value, and divided by the number of items. So the hammer was expensive, but the custom designed engine was _cheap_.
The toilet seat was actually a panel of a plane that _included_ a toilet seat thing (technical terms here, #4 below). It evidently got press because "A Missouri toilet seat maker" thought that "toilet lavatory cover" meant "standard domestic toilet seat", and felt he could undercut Lockheed. When he got told no, he contacted his senator, and...
1. https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the... 2. https://www.ashlime.com/insights/2019/3/4/the-fallacy-of-the... 3. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-story-behind-the... 4. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/AT+LAST+THE+TRUTH+IS+TOLD%3A+...